The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential people in Computer Science,
#651
Eric Grimson
#6371
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
William Eric Leifur Grimson is a Canadian-born computer scientist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he served as Chancellor from 2011 to 2014. An expert in computer vision, he headed MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from 2005 to 2011 and currently serves as its Chancellor for Academic Advancement.
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Kunle Olukotun
#6310
Overall Influence
Oyekunle Ayinde "Kunle" Olukotun is a British-born Nigerian computer scientist who is the Cadence Design Systems Professor of the Stanford School of Engineering, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford University and the director of the Stanford Pervasive Parallelism Lab. Olukotun is known as the “father of the multi-core processor”, and the leader of the Stanford Hydra Chip Multiprocessor research project. Olukotun's achievements include designing the first general-purpose multi-core CPU, innovating single-chip multiprocessor and multi-threaded processor design, ...
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Robert S. Barton
#7461
Overall Influence
1925 - 2009 (84 years)
Robert Stanley "Bob" Barton was the chief architect of the Burroughs B5000 and other computers such as the B1700, a co-inventor of dataflow architecture, and an influential professor at the University of Utah.
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Marc Levoy
#10375
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Marc Levoy is a computer graphics researcher and Professor Emeritus of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, a vice president and Fellow at Adobe Inc., and a Distinguished Engineer at Google. He is noted for pioneering work in volume rendering, light fields, and computational photography.
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Travis Oliphant
#6377
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Travis Oliphant is an American data scientist and businessman. He is a co-founder of NumFOCUS, 501 nonprofit charity in the United States, and sits on its advisory board. He is also a founder of technology startup Anaconda . In addition, Travis is the primary creator of NumPy and founding contributor to the SciPy packages in the Python programming language.
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Akinori Yonezawa
#15338
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Akinori Yonezawa is a Japanese computer scientist specializing in object-oriented programming, distributed computing and information security. Being a graduate of the University of Tokyo, Yonezawa has a Ph.D. in computer science from MIT in the Actor group at the MIT AI Lab. He currently teaches at the University of Tokyo. He is the designer of ABCL/R, a reflective subset of the first concurrent object-oriented programming language ABCL/1.
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Alan Cox
#6670
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Alan Cox is a British computer programmer who has been a key figure in the development of Linux. He maintained the 2.2 branch of the Linux kernel and continues to be heavily involved in its development, an association that dates back to 1991. He lives in Swansea, Wales, where he lived with his wife Telsa Gwynne, who died in 2015 and now lives with author Tara Neale, whom he married in 2020. He graduated with a BSc in Computer Science from Swansea University in 1991 and received an MBA from the same university in 2005.
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Gene H. Golub
#7606
Overall Influence
1932 - 2007 (75 years)
Gene Howard Golub , was an American numerical analyst who taught at Stanford University as Fletcher Jones Professor of Computer Science and held a courtesy appointment in electrical engineering. Personal life Born in Chicago, he was educated at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, receiving his B.S. , M.A. and Ph.D. all in mathematics. His M.A. degree was more specifically in Mathematical Statistics. His PhD dissertation was entitled "The Use of Chebyshev Matrix Polynomials in the Iterative Solution of Linear Equations Compared to the Method of Successive Overrelaxation" and his thesis adviser was Abraham Taub.
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James G. Mitchell
#10765
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
James George Mitchell is a Canadian computer scientist. He has worked on programming language design and implementation , interactive programming systems, dynamic interpreting and compiling, document preparing systems, user interface design, distributed transactional file systems, and distributed, object-oriented operating systems. He has also worked on the design of hardware for computer graphics, high-level programming language execution, and audio input/output.
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Patrick Cousot
#9763
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Patrick Cousot is a French computer scientist, currently Silver Professor of Computer Science at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University, USA. Before he was Professor at the École Normale Supérieure , Paris, France, the École Polytechnique, Palaiseau, France and the University of Metz, France and a Research Scientist at the French National Center for Scientific Research at the Joseph Fourier University, Grenoble, France.
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T. William Olle
#10942
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
T. William Olle was a British computer scientist and consultant and President of T. William Olle Associates, England. Biography Bill Olle was educated at Boston Grammar School . He received an M.Sc. degree in 1954 and a Ph.D. degree in 1957, both in Astrophysics at the University of Manchester, which involved extensive programming work on the Manchester University Electronic Computer.
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Severin Hacker
#5833
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (40 years)
Severin Hacker is a Swiss computer scientist who is the co-founder and CTO of Duolingo, the world's most popular language-learning platform. Biography Hacker was born and raised in Zug and studied at ETH Zurich. In a 2020 interview, Hacker specified that gaming played a large role in his interest in computer science: "What originally drew me to computers was video games and the desire to build your own games and understand how those games are built. I was somewhat obsessed."
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Georg Nees
#9134
Overall Influence
1926 - 2016 (90 years)
Georg Nees was a German academic who was a pioneer of computer art and generative graphics. He studied mathematics, physics and philosophy in Erlangen and Stuttgart and was scientific advisor at the SEMIOSIS, International Journal of semiotics and aesthetics. In 1977, he was appointed Honorary Professor of Applied computer science at the University of Erlangen Nees is one of the "3N" computer pioneers, an abbreviation that has become acknowledged for Frieder Nake, Georg Nees and A. Michael Noll, whose computer graphics were created with digital computers.
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Abraham Silberschatz
#11380
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Avi Silberschatz is an Israeli computer scientist and researcher. He graduated in 1976 with a Ph.D. in computer science from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He became the Sidney J. Weinberg Professor of Computer Science at Yale University, USA in 2005. He was the chair of the Computer Science department at Yale from 2005 to 2011. Prior to coming to Yale in 2003, he was the Vice President of the Information Sciences Research Center at Bell Labs. He previously held an endowed professorship at the University of Texas at Austin, where he taught until 1993. His research interests include database systems, operating systems, storage systems, and network management.
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Nimrod Megiddo
#4518
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Nimrod Megiddo is a mathematician and computer scientist. He is a research scientist at the IBM Almaden Research Center and Stanford University. His interests include combinatorial optimization, algorithm design and analysis, game theory, and machine learning. He was one of the first people to propose a solution to the bounding sphere and smallest-circle problem.
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Roger Moore
#11955
Overall Influence
1939 - 2019 (80 years)
Roger D. Moore was the 1973 recipient of the Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery . It was given "for their work in the design and implementation of APL\360, setting new standards in simplicity, efficiency, reliability and response time for interactive systems."
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Virginia Vassilevska Williams
#8749
Overall Influence
Virginia Vassilevska Williams is a theoretical computer scientist and mathematician known for her research in computational complexity theory and algorithms. She is currently the Steven and Renee Finn Career Development Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is notable for her breakthrough results in fast matrix multiplication, for her work on dynamic algorithms, and for helping to develop the field of fine-grained complexity.
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Johnny Carson
#170
Overall Influence
1925 - 2005 (80 years)
John William Carson was an American television host, comedian, writer, and producer. He is best known as the host of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson . Carson received six Primetime Emmy Awards, the Television Academy's 1980 Governor's Award, and a 1985 Peabody Award. He was inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame in 1987. Carson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1992 and received a Kennedy Center Honor in 1993.
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Oren Patashnik
#8171
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Oren Patashnik is an American computer scientist. He is notable for co-creating BibTeX, and co-writing Concrete Mathematics: A Foundation for Computer Science. He is a researcher at the Center for Communications Research, La Jolla, and lives nearby in San Diego. Oren and his wife Amy have three children, Josh, Ariel, and Jeremy.
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Bob Scheifler
#10472
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Robert William Scheifler is an American computer scientist. He was born in Kirkwood, Missouri. He is most notable for leading the development of the X Window System from the project's inception in 1984 until the closure of the MIT X Consortium in 1996. He later became one of the architects of the Jini architecture at Sun Microsystems.
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Martin Newell
#9851
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Martin Edward Newell is a British-born computer scientist specializing in computer graphics who is perhaps best known as the creator of the Utah teapot computer model. Career Before emigrating to the US, he worked at what was then the Computer-Aided Design Centre in Cambridge, UK, along with his brother Dick Newell . At CADCentre, the two Newells and Tom Sancha developed Newell's algorithm, a technique for eliminating cyclic dependencies when ordering polygons to be drawn by a computer graphics system.
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Yinyu Ye
#6594
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Yinyu Ye is a Chinese American theoretical computer scientist working on mathematical optimization. He is a specialist in interior point methods, especially in convex minimization and linear programming. He is a professor of Management Science and Engineering and Kwoh-Ting Li Chair Professor of Engineering at Stanford University. He also holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Electrical Engineering. Ye also is a co-founder of minMax Optimization Inc.
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Marek Karpinski
#12847
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Marek Karpinski is a computer scientist and mathematician known for his research in the theory of algorithms and their applications, combinatorial optimization, computational complexity, and mathematical foundations. He is a recipient of several research prizes in the above areas.
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Severo Ornstein
#10028
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Severo M. Ornstein is a retired computer scientist and son of American composer Leo Ornstein. In 1955 he joined MIT's Lincoln Laboratory as a programmer and designer for the SAGE air-defense system. He later joined the TX-2 group and became a member of the team that designed the LINC. He moved with the team to Washington University in St. Louis where he was one of the principal designers of macromodules.
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David Eppstein
#6837
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
David Arthur Eppstein is an American computer scientist and mathematician. He is a distinguished professor of computer science at the University of California, Irvine. He is known for his work in computational geometry, graph algorithms, and recreational mathematics. In 2011, he was named an ACM Fellow.
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Ryszard S. Michalski
#12933
Overall Influence
1937 - 2007 (70 years)
Ryszard S. Michalski was a Polish-American computer scientist. Michalski was Professor at George Mason University and a pioneer in the field of machine learning. Biography Michalski was born in Kalusz near Lvov on 7 May 1937.
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Robert C. Prim
#5943
Overall Influence
1921 - Present (103 years)
Robert Clay Prim III was an American mathematician and computer scientist. Biography Robert Clay Prim III was born in Sweetwater, Texas on September 25, 1921. In 1941, Prim received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin, where he also met his wife Alice Prim , whom he married in 1942. Later in 1949, he received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Princeton University, where he also worked as a research associate from 1948 until 1949.
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Eric S. Roberts
#10270
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Eric S. Roberts is an American computer scientist noted for his contributions to computer science education through textbook authorship and his leadership in computing curriculum development. He is a co-chair of the ACM Education Council, former co-chair of the ACM Education Board, and a former member of the SIGCSE Board. He led the Java task force in 1994. He was a Professor emeritus at Stanford University. He currently teaches at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon.
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Manindra Agrawal
#8908
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Manindra Agrawal is an Indian computer scientist and professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. He was the recipient of the first Infosys Prize for Mathematics, the Godel Prize in 2006; and the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award in Mathematical Sciences in 2003. He has been honoured with Padma Shri, India's 4th highest civilian award, in 2013.
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Drew McDermott
#10791
Overall Influence
1949 - 2022 (73 years)
Drew McDermott was a professor of Computer Science at Yale University. He was known for his contributions in artificial intelligence and automated planning. Education Drew McDermott earned B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology .
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Dan Boneh
#10739
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Dan Boneh is an Israeli–American professor in applied cryptography and computer security at Stanford University. In 2016, Boneh was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for contributions to the theory and practice of cryptography and computer security.
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Subhash Kak
#2845
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Subhash Kak is an Indian-American computer scientist and historical revisionist. He is the Regents Professor of Computer Science Department at Oklahoma State University–Stillwater, an honorary visiting professor of engineering at Jawaharlal Nehru University, and a member of the Indian Prime Minister's Science, Technology and Innovation Advisory Council .
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Mike Cowlishaw
#7858
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Mike Cowlishaw is a visiting professor at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Warwick, and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. He is a retired IBM Fellow, and was a Fellow of the Institute of Engineering and Technology, and the British Computer Society. He was educated at Monkton Combe School and the University of Birmingham.
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David Haussler
#6866
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
David Haussler is an American bioinformatician known for his work leading the team that assembled the first human genome sequence in the race to complete the Human Genome Project and subsequently for comparative genome analysis that deepens understanding the molecular function and evolution of the genome.
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Lance Fortnow
#7680
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Lance Jeremy Fortnow is a computer scientist known for major results in computational complexity and interactive proof systems. He is currently Dean of the College of Computing at the Illinois Institute of Technology.
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Mihai Nadin
#9476
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Mihai Nadin is a scholar and researcher in electrical engineering, computer science, aesthetics, semiotics, human-computer interaction , computational design, post-industrial society, and anticipatory systems. His publications on these topics number over 200, and he has lectured throughout the world.
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Usama Fayyad
#11227
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Usama M. Fayyad is an American-Jordanian data scientist and co-founder of KDD conferences and ACM SIGKDD association for Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. He is a speaker on Business Analytics, Data Mining, Data Science, and Big Data. He recently left his role as the Chief Data Officer at Barclays Bank.
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Gilad Bracha
#11557
Overall Influence
Gilad Bracha is a software engineer at F5 Networks, and formerly at Google, where he was on the Dart programming language team. He is creator of the Newspeak language, and co-author of the second and third editions of the Java Language Specification, and a major contributor to the second edition of the Java Virtual Machine Specification.
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Daniela L. Rus
#11571
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Daniela L. Rus is a roboticist and computer scientist, Director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory , and the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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Anders Sandberg
#5040
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Anders Sandberg is a Swedish researcher, futurist and transhumanist. He holds a PhD in computational neuroscience from Stockholm University, and is currently a senior research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow at Reuben College.
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Hiroaki Kitano
#5358
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Hiroaki Kitano is a Japanese scientist. He is the head of the Systems Biology Institute ; Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Sony Group Corporation, Chief Executive Officer of Sony Research Inc. and Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc.; a Group Director of the Laboratory for Disease Systems Modeling at and RIKEN Center for Integrative Medical Sciences; and a professor at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology . Kitano is known for developing AIBO, and the robotic world cup tournament known as Robocup.
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Aravind Joshi
#4501
Overall Influence
1929 - 2017 (88 years)
Aravind Krishna Joshi was the Henry Salvatori Professor of Computer and Cognitive Science in the computer science department of the University of Pennsylvania. Joshi defined the tree-adjoining grammar formalism which is often used in computational linguistics and natural language processing.
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Daniel J. Sandin
#11206
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Daniel J. Sandin is an American video and computer graphics artist, designer and researcher. He is a Professor Emeritus of the School of Art & Design at University of Illinois at Chicago, and co-director of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is an internationally recognized pioneer in computer graphics, electronic art and visualization.
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Nello Cristianini
#13619
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Nello Cristianini is a professor of Artificial Intelligence in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Bath. Education Cristianini holds a degree in physics from the University of Trieste, a Master in computational intelligence from the University of London and a PhD from the University of Bristol. Previously he has been a professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Bristol, an associate professor at the University of California, Davis, and held visiting positions at other universities.
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Willem van der Poel
#12492
Overall Influence
1926 - Present (98 years)
Willem Louis van der Poel is a Dutch computer scientist, who is known for designing one of the first computers to be designed in the Netherlands, the Zeer Eenvoudige Binaire Reken Automaat , translated as Very Simple Binary Automatic Calculator.
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Jimmy Fallon
#459
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
James Thomas Fallon is an American comedian, television host and actor. Best known for his work in television, Fallon's breakthrough came during his tenure as a cast member on the NBC sketch comedy series Saturday Night Live from 1998 to 2004. He was the host of the late-night talk show Late Night with Jimmy Fallon from 2009 to 2014, and became the anchor of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon following his departure from Late Night.
Go to Profile#697
Isabelle Guyon
#13448
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Isabelle Guyon is a French-born researcher in machine learning known for her work on support-vector machines, artificial neural networks and bioinformatics. She is a Chair Professor at the University of Paris-Saclay.
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John Mylopoulos
#11046
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
John Mylopoulos is a Greek-Canadian computer scientist, Professor at the University of Toronto, Canada, and at the University of Trento, Italy. He is known for his work in the field of conceptual modeling, specifically the development an agent-oriented software development methodology. called TROPOS.
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Craig Reynolds
#10638
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Craig W. Reynolds , is an artificial life and computer graphics expert, who created the Boids artificial life simulation in 1986. Reynolds worked on the film Tron as a scene programmer, and on Batman Returns as part of the video image crew. Reynolds won the 1998 Academy Scientific and Technical Award in recognition of "his pioneering contributions to the development of three-dimensional computer animation for motion picture production." He is the author of the OpenSteer library.
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John C. Butcher
#7855
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
John Charles Butcher is a New Zealand mathematician who specialises in numerical methods for the solution of ordinary differential equations. Butcher works on multistage methods for initial value problems, such as Runge-Kutta and general linear methods. The Butcher group and the Butcher tableau are named after him. More recently, he is investigating a new type of method with stability identical to that of a Runge-Kutta method.
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